The next year will be a real test of the government's mettle: will it stand by its historic pledge and find the resources, in a hostile political and economic climate, to halve child poverty by 2010, or will it weaken and put resources into more popular causes? Strange though it may seem to many, the goal of ending child poverty by 2020 has failed to strike a chord with the electorate.

To meet the 2010 target, the method is quite simple. The government will have to find around £2.8bn next year and the year after to increase the child tax credit (or some similarly targeted measure).

Meeting the ultimate 2020 target will require a more sophisticated strategy. To start with, the UK has the highest proportion of children growing up in workless households, so more needs to be done to tackle worklessness. This will necessitate a more radical approach to welfare reform.

However, more than half of all poor children live in households where someone is working, so much more needs to be done to make sure that people move out of poverty when they move into work.

While tax credits will continue to have an important role in raising incomes, there is a limit to what can be achieved through tax credits alone. Measures are also needed to help households reduce the risk of poverty by having more than one person in the household in work. This means doing more to enable mothers and fathers to balance work and care.

And, of course, low wages have to be addressed. This means high-paying industries need to start paying their low-paid workers more and low-paying industries need greater support and greater challenge to raise their wages.

In the short term then, the challenge is coming up with significant extra cash to transfer to poor families. This will get the government back on track to meeting its ultimate target and send out a message that an anti-poverty agenda still sits at Labour's heart. In the longer term, a much stronger coalition between government, employers and citizens is needed to achieve sustainable change and end child poverty for good.